I've been harassing you on and off since January for a foreword to my first novel, 'Dolls'. It's a BDSM murder mystery comedy thing, coming out March next year with bluechrome publishing. I've also got a few short stories kicking around, and I'm working on a collection of twisted/bizarro/transgressive goods at the moment.

writing/research website at www.kayleighjmoore.com

Thanks for reading! Don't forget to let me know if you want me to re-send you the digital copy (due to computer death) or if you prefer a hard copy with a complimentary packet of Silk Cuts.

I've got multiple short stories our at various virtual magazines on the net, the most recent being in the February issue of Written Word Magazine. I wrote for R. Talsorian Games back in the day and right now I'm hip deep in the final book of a trilogy. You can buy my chapbooks (The Wishing Coin, Fortunes Told While You Wait, and Rubies For Her) here: http://huntpress.com. The Wishing Coin can be found on Amazon too.

In the meantime, have a sample from the current novel, Broken Rainbow:

Los Angeles, California

Sabine Parsons felt Death coming in on the Santa Ana winds.

She pressed her hand against the front room window of the small house she shared with her best friend, Ari Doran, the chill of the lingering winter not chasing the premonition from her skin. Blue eyes narrowed, but she saw nothing outside. Only the bending palm trees as the heavy wind blew and rattled shingles of the house.

Either way, it wasn't the wind that made her fear to go to sleep.

With such a premonition pulling the Casting tide across her blood and bone, experience told her Dream would be waiting as soon as she closed her eyes. She rubbed her arms, blue satin PJs soft against her hands.

She was sick of Dreams and Dreaming.

"Avoiding sleep won't keep the Dreams away," Ari Doran said from behind her and Sabine turned to face her best friend. "After seventy-two hours, you'll start dreaming whether you like it or not."

Sabine gave a crooked grin.

"I've only been awake for forty-eight so far. I've got a little slack."

Ari yawned and took a seat on the big purple velvet couch, folding her long frame, drawing knees to her chest. The baggy red nightshirt she wore tented over the knees, while the oversized white robe she wore only emphasized her paleness. Their recent trip to Japan and return had take it out of both of them. Only Ari had been smart enough to sleep since they'd landed.

Sabine just refused.

"You should get some sleep before we get on the plane," Ari tried gently.

Sabine considered her friend. Dropped her head and closed her eyes.

"You're right," she conceded.

After all, within the next twelve hours, she had to be at her father's funeral. Sabine turned away from the window, moving slow and in a manner that made Ari give her a quizzical look.

"What else's wrong?"

"Backlash."

"Still?" Ari frowned. Sabine didn't have to say more to describe the final confrontation that she'd had with the Black Abbess on the slopes of Mount Fuji.

"Still," Sabine said with a nod. "Feel like I've been hit by a Mack truck."

"That's because you pretty much were."

"Point."

"And don't ever do it again."

"I make no promises," Sabine said with a wave of her hand and a small smile. "Go to bed, Ari. I will too."

An hour later, laying on her futon, staring at the ceiling, Sabine decided she'd at least close her eyes. Give in to the inevitable.

No beach. No storm.

Sabine stood in the desert.

Red buttes dotted the desert plane, giant monoliths older than time. She stood on the side of one, near the base, craning her neck, she took in the giant red cliff behind her and the dawn or dusk light around her. No sun. Just enough light to make out her surroundings and yet still see some stars in the indigo sky.

She turned around and nearly screamed.

A giant black bear sat in the mouth of a cave behind her.

The Bear sat up and did the inexplicable. Pointed with a paw at the plain, which forced Sabine to turn about again.

Under the indigo sky, a herd of horses ran. But they were only the outlines of horses or holes punched in the landscape. Within the horse shapes were nothing but perfect daylit blue sky. Clouds described manes and tails in the outlined horses. They ran back and forth across the plain with the literal sound of thunder in their hooves.

Sabine stood there with the Bear, awe stealing her breath while the sky horses danced under the indigo sky.

Good morning. My name's Edward Morris, and I work out of Portland, Oregon. I mostly write short fiction, novellas and cinderblock-shaped things that take several plane flights to get through. Here are some links to my work that I plucked right off the top.

At the edge of the Dysart woods on the Swamp's opposite shore are the former digs of Powersburg's sole ironmaster, and his insane son who became Governor for a very short while, then disappeared.

To most locals, Ehrend Mansion is no more than a tired old historical landmark. Money has been poured into renovations. Strange sights all around the area have devolved into cute, safe ghost stories. Moans have been heard in the dumbwaiter. Soldiers in Union blue have been seen on the grounds.There’s a wedding gown on the second floor in a glass case that dances by itself at the full of the moon.

But none of the Mansion’s real history is ever touched on, the history Justin and Rika and me, and all the Genejokes, learned in the Dreamwalk…. The infanticide of Ross Ehrend that didn’t take, and the son’s utterly mythic revenge. The rash of stolen children, the archives of unsolved kidnappings and murders remaining open on the books of the Powersburg Police to this day… since 1789.

On the hidden side of town, the Dream side, the old Ehrend place is something else entirely. In the Dream, Ehrend Mansion shows itself the way it really looks: A putrefacting yellow-gray bulk with a gambrel roof like a ridged, peeling skull and lead-crystal windows that follow you, and blink. Milk-carton kids scream from pens in the cellar, trapped behind walls they can’t yell through when the tour groups go by.

Listen with me. The more stories get told in Powersburg, the more the Crooked Man loses his power over all of us. My true love taught me that. Now I want to teach the world what goes on here.

I want to trace all the names, like a charcoal grave-rubbing on sketchpad paper held over the old, leaning tombstones all through the graveyards in town. Most of the population here is in the cemeteries, which works out especially well around Election Day.

Most of them lived and died here in this Swamp of rumor whose waters grow clearer down to an unfathomable bottom where lower creatures snap and snarl in the acid mere.Trace the wall of their names with me, perchance to perceive the true shape of the past rising out of a land none of us can claim.

I want to trace the wall of their names, my charcoal-stick skating down the rotten stone of the Old County Court House, the spired tip-of-the-iceberg clock tower whose bell always tolls the wrong time….

What a piece of work it is, the only truly city-sized structure in Town that’s not a church, ringed around the roof with copper statues of sundry officials, gargoyles and unknowns in various stages of Leaning With Intent To Fall. High atop its black frosting of pigeon shit, helming three centuries of dead skin petrified into a wedding cake like the hood ornament they are, Blind Justice and the Unknown Soldier stand frozen back to back, Truth and Power eternally divorced, snarling and wielding swords.

Below the crumbling loam of the Courthouse lawn, the anger of the dispossessed bubbles up into the water table to be burnt off as steam in the municipal haze of morning, dawn factory whistles echoing over our necropolitan valley…

The past is all still here, buried by Great-Aunt Cricket herself behind a Civil War cypher of blind informational alleys in the Library. The real story, as we Dreamwalked it, is older than the glaciers that carved out the Swamp, newer than the first child who was ever told not to play near there.

Once upon a time, the Town Fathers built a model railroad, and made it go hell-bent for election. But the paint began to run in the numbers. All but the old began to move out.

The soil of all those graveyards has begun to erode. In springtime, the hillsides slide downward , and coffins shoot across the highways during thunderstorms like slick wet bullets. The bodies won’t lie still until the day when the graveyards are clean of stones and all the butchered dead come home to their Destroyer.

Tell ‘em where all the bodies are really buried, ya candy-assed richies... But my words would be lost on deaf boards and associations, the cockroaches of Real Estate, the glass case mummy hearts of zoning committee and chamber of commerce shoveling dirt on the American Dream…

I'm Joe Nassise. Like Keith and Cherie, I write novels for a living. I have sold eleven to date - six in Germany to Droemer-Knaur (Der Ketzer, Der Engel, Die Schatten are all available, three more due out over the next two years), four in the States to Pocket and Gold Eagle (Riverwatch and Heretic available, two more later this year), and one in Italy (La Bestia Ancestrale available), with additional translations into Russian and Chinese. You can find more about all of them, including links ot purchase them if you're so inclined, here. I've also done a fair amount of short fiction and some work in both the rpg and comic fields.

I've got a new novel due at the end of the day today, called EYES TO SEE. As I beat my head against my deadline, I thought I'd share a little. Here are the opening lines...

I gave up my eyes in order to see more clearly.

That was many years ago and I don’t miss them all that much, except perhaps on days like this. The rain started late in the afternoon and by the time I stepped outside it had become a steady downpour, making the pavement slick beneath my feet and washing out the smells I normally use to help orient myself whenever I leave home. Thankfully the car service was punctual and moments later I was safely ensconced in the rear seat and headed across town to the address I’d been given.I leaned back and tried to calm my nerves. Stanton’s phone call had jolted me out of some much needed sleep.

“I need you on the Hill” he said, in his usual annoyed tone, and rattled off an address. I knew better than to argue. He had me cold and I knew he’d squeeze me for every ounce he could get. Being called out in the middle of the night was a minor inconvenience compared to what he could do to the shattered remnants of my life. Thing was, it hadn’t happened for a while and I wondered what it was going to be this time. Wondered just how bad it was going to get before the night was through.

Hi, I'm Allyson. I'm an essayist. My first book is Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? I'm working on my second book, now. It's tentatively titled The Atheist's Guide to Tragedy, and I believe it will be just as crappy as my first book.

I'm really not so good with the self-promotion thing. My agent is gonna kill me if she sees this.

Vampire People is about internet communities, specifically, the BtVS/Angel/Firefly boards. Tragedy is about my neighbors and neighborhood in L.A. there are a lot of stories about strippers and astral projection, and advice on how to get free rum from the liquor store on the corner by flashing your boobs.

I'm Mark Teppo. I wrote a hypertext novel about psychopharmacology and dream realities for Farrago's Wainscot last year. The shiny entry point to it is here.

I've got my first novel, Lightbreaker, coming out from Nightshade Books in September. Here's the marketing blurb, and there's more info (including a summary) here.

"Coming in September is newcomer Mark Teppo’s Lightbreaker, an explosive, action-packed occult thriller combining Western magick, Hermetic traditions, and shamanism. Fans of Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen novels are going to be blown away by this one."

We're working on some other ancillary content for the lead-in, and I'll probably be pimping that as it come available.

(Kadrey might like this one. I think he was casting about for something to read a few weeks back.)

My name is Todd Keisling. I'm another working class chap who writes in his spare time.

This is my website. My first novel is called A Life Transparent, and you can find all the info you'd ever want about it here. It's also available as a free download. Your buddy Darick bought a copy of it. No clue if he actually enjoyed it or not, but his support was enough for me.

Thanks for your time.

P.S. I'm enjoying FreakAngels very much. Can't wait for the next issue.

...Maybe it’s the changing of the leaves that I remember from Long Island as a child. Passing that old Grumman Facility on the Sunrise Highway, the leaves rolling off the trees and burning in the sunlight. It's about all I can remember about my early years in the north. It shaped my idea of what a fall should look like. Later on I began to think of the leaves dieing every time I watched the launches from Kennedy Space Center. I had forgotten what seasons where like when I moved to Florida - it was either hot, wet, or both. A few times a year it would drop into the 30’s, but it was hardly what I’d ever call “winter”. It just meant I sweat alot less when I wore my favorite suits.

This year, though, October is a month of fire because I am watching the camera on the launch pad as the last solid fuel rocket carries the body of Robert Helam into the air, out of the atmosphere, and away from terra firma. Away, that is, towards the sun where the body of the most important man in the history of space exploration - that is, since John F. Kennedy bent the Russians and NASA over one giant chair and let rip - is going to be incinerated in the universe’s largest sarcophagus.

Helam, as you know, is the science-fiction writer who first adopted the “Shut the fuck up, you dicks, I know what I’m doing!” attitude of his contemporary American presidents to silence critics of manned space flight. I don’t think, though, any of you knew that he really genuinely enjoyed Kylie Minogue. Of course you didn’t. You never drove in a car with him - It was maddening. Despite this, Helam and I were good friends. We skulked in the same circles. He was a science fiction writer (at a time where things like “curing cancer”, & “terraforming Mars” were something we all wanted but we too busy snickering at,) who became proactive in much the same way that Stephen King became a speed bump. It was if Sci-Fi was a new religion, and Robbie had fashioned himself a cult-of-personality.

So, sadly, in September of this year - amid the laughable Hurricane Cader - I watched as the man who pioneered the use of social networking sites as tools to better expand the reach of SETI@home (as well as applying the same structures to NASA’s mission computers, and even tying advertising dollars to fund early Constellation Project missions,) leaked brain matter out of his nose.

Halem, the giant of human inginuity was struck dumb by Cerebral Deterioration Virus. CeDeV, the disease created when the earliest cancer-fighting nanobots began attacking the wrong sorts of bio-matter, was literally rotting the brain of one of the world’s brightest men. So here I sit, some 75 years after my birth, in an armpit state I refuse to leave, watching as my good friend Robbie is rocketed off to become star-fuel. President Marsh sits in attendence straightening her skirt, next to her is Markum Futures - the noted Extra-Terrestrial Biologist & Sociologist - in a Def Leopard t-shirt. And it dawns on me, as his bloated and brainless corpse rocketed towards the sun, and as I stare at these two mental “giants” set to take us to the next stage of human exploration, that nothing hurt more than not having my friend Dr. Halem hanging around.

Because, as with all great minds, everything just felt brighter with him around. Instead, I’m stuck with the sickly brown of a wet Florida October, instead of the luxurious fiery leaves of a New York fall. And that is no way to frame a goodbye.

My name's Dan Solomon. I'm a spoken word performer, but I've taken a year off from that to finish a novel.

The book is called weathered. It's about people in post-Katrina New Orleans. The lead here in this bit is a successful MC named Jackson, who is undergoing a crisis of faith regarding his career.

He stops for a moment and listens. His ears are usually so active, so careful to pick up whatever stray sounds are nearby, but since the moment he got out of the car he's heard nothing but the sound of his own blood pumping. He stops to listen, and he hears the sound of hammers – hammers and staple guns, it sounds like – pounding away from within a few blocks.

The noise is quick, arrhythmic, a boom – boom – ba-ba-boom – ba-boom – boom – ba-boom – ba-ba-ba-boom of meaningless percussion. He walks in the direction of the sound.

On the corner of Canal and Lopez is an old church. Jackson knows it well – he went there on Sundays as a child when he would stay with his grandmother. He remembers the acoustics of the massive chamber, the way that hundreds of voices would carry up to the ceiling and swirl around in the spire before slowly making their way back down to the people singing. He loved the way it sounded. In an interview he gave to XXL magazinesix months after the release of his first album, he told the reporter (a woman Janine; they had slept together after the article ran and he failed to call her again. She hadn't expected him to) that he had first felt music as a living, breathing force in that space. He knew that church, knew what the sounds that sprang from it could mean.

The sound of the chamber is as lovely to him now, as the framework on the base is being repaired by those wonderful hammers, as it had been as a child. Jackson sprints the final block, looks up and sees the scaffolding in place and the men from top to bottom. Up high, peeling the shingles off of the roof, ostensibly to be replaced, and down low, swinging those hammers and banging Jackson's world back into a shape that makes some sense.

Percussion! Jackson knew percussion, had given impromptu orations on the power of a drum – You hear the way it sounds, a low vibration that comes from a thing being hit? A drum – a real drum, now – I got no problem with machines but I'm talkin' a real drum – makes its noise because somebody's hittin' it. What moves your head – you know what I'm talkin' about, and Jackson would illustrate by slapping the wall at this point with his right hand, for the lower sound akin to a bass drum, while his left brushed against his outer thigh like a snare, playing the two in 4/4 time.

Boom-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-boom-boom-boom-ba-ba-boom. Whoever his audience was for the monologue – Lizzie, or the boys on the tour bus, or maybe some writer with XXL he could tell wanted an excuse like he's way deeper than you think to bring back to her girls when she explained why she spent twenty minutes on her back with him – whoever it was he was talking to when he was giving the speech on the power of the drum, he'd hit the wall and his leg and start nodding his head in rhythm with the noise.

And that – he'd deliver this line with pride, like a high school history teacher who had come up with a favorite lecture on the War of 1812 and delivered it with excitement every year – that is why they call it a beat. It's a beat, as in, you're beatin' the drum. We're moved by beats, they get our heads noddin'. You see this? Nod your head, it means 'yeah'. Everywhere you go, every club in the country or anywhere else, people do this, nod their heads in approval for the sound it makes when somethin' gets beat. Drums are powerful. And drum machines? They just the memories of old drums, got beat back when.What we do is give people a reason to celebrate the sound of somethin' getting hit. That's the power of a drum.

But he didn't know.

Then, he didn't know. Now?

Percussion is life. The way we mark time, the unit by which we measure change. Nothing is permanent. Drums turn impermanence into music. Jackson knew it, felt it now in a way he never had before. This off-rhythm sounds of tools, hammers and staple guns affixing metal to wood, they were keeping time for the change that was swirling around him. This was music! What he had done before, what he had been before – Jackpot – that was something else.

If hip-hop is alive in the streets, it's in these streets. If I'm an artist, this is the music I need to be making.

If you're interested in more, feel free to visit dansolomon.com and take anything you like.

I'm Joe Lopez. I write when I'm not doing web design for the State of Wyoming, with my family or playing in my band. Mostly it turns out to be urban fantasy/horror. I've written a handful of things that sit on my desk, waiting patiently to move to the second draft stage. Hopefully, sometimes soon I can get that done and send my stories out into the world to try their wings.

This is a bit from a novel called, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing. It's a conversation one might have with a dragon in a topless club.

"One of your kind did this to me," Grendel croaked, "trapped me in this decaying house with his damned trickery and hedge magic." He pulled his hand back and took a drag. "I don't know how you live in these empty rooms with broken windows." he continued sullenly. He lost himself briefly in thought. "Constantly dining on ashes," his voice mournful as he tapped his ashes off, "chained to this barren earth." Chas sat, listening intently. Honestly, how often was it that you got to sit down with a dragon? In his mind's eye, he could almost feel what it was like. He wondered if it was his words or something more inherent in his nature. "Oh, and how I miss soaring." A hacking cough forced him to stop. He set his cigarette down until the coughing subsided and then picked it up and took another drag.

"Most of all," Grendel exhaled noisily, "I miss my memories, or at least the clarity of them." He stubbed his cigarette out and took another one from his pack. "They all seem blurred and faded now." For a moment, he sagged in his chair. He was nothing more than an old man reminiscing. Then he sat up, "There was a time when killing me would have merited an epic poem." He pointed sternly at Chas. "Now, one of these girls could kill me in a fit of pique with her shoe and I'd be lucky to get two inches on page twenty-nine." Thoughts carried him off again. "So, what do you have for me?"

"First, this." Chas rose up a little in his seat and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a five-dollar bill and slapped it on the tabletop. "How did you know they weren't gonna last?"

"The girl had bad stars." He wagged his finger at Chas again, "Any man trying to hold onto her would need chains and a collar."

"I hear she likes that," Chas injected. Grendel chuckled throatily, took the money off the table and held it up by a corner like holding a dead fish. "What?" Chas asked puzzled.

"If we'd known you humans would turn currency into this ungraceful chit, we would've burned the whole lot of you." He shrugged and put the bill into his pocket. Tina came up, dropped off Chas' water, and then disappeared again. He took a sip.

"Now," he began bluntly, "I know you didn't come to see me to pay off a bet. What do you really need?"

"Information." he mumbled, his cigarette danced between his lips as he spoke, "It's all I ever need, innit?"

Hi, I'm David, and not so much a prose person anymore as a playwright and graphic designer. If that counts, then feel free to check out some of my work at the Riverrun Theatre Company.

There are two short plays as flash videos in the media section. A full-length play expanded from one of these will be produced at the Capitol Fringe Festival in Washington, DC, this July. (Hint: it's not the one about the poet.)

There are also two playscripts for sale in the (needs to be updated) store there. Both of those are simple crime stories, interrogations in slightly different forms, part of a sequence of one-act plays called Mosaic.

(And if you're really curious about the design work, then click here.)

I am Carolyn. This is my website. My first novel came out in 2006 from Unbridled Books and was about a misfit girl who becomes a trapeze star in an old-time travelling side show and circus. And it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE. My second comes out in Spring 2009 from Three Rivers Press and is about the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story living in present day NYC. It will also change your life. I am currently writing many many more books that will change your life. One is set in medieval Italy and one is an old-fashioned noir.

Look:

She was ready. My work was done. I stood back and looked her over. I had outdone myself, I thought, but I didn’t feel the usual satisfaction. Not even close.

Her face was radiant, perfect. The smudges of dirt were gone, the circles under her eyes disappeared. Her eyes were almost shockingly blue. Her starlight hair lay piled on her head, with long tendrils hanging down her neck. The gown nipped in her waist, flared out over her hips, and shimmied along her as she moved, stopping just above the glass slippers that shone like diamonds from under the hem. The dress’s pale blue color lit up her skin, making it luminous and pale, almost iridescent. I looked at her and thought of pearls, the inside of shells.

We were rarely moved by human beauty, but I found myself frozen in front of her with my heart caught in my throat. She seemed absurd in the dusty stone room, standing in front of the cracked mirror, next to the straw mattress on the floor. I thought of her mother, her fairy blood. No matter how much magic I had worked on her to sweep up her hair and brighten her cheeks, it was clear that her beauty was something inside her, a gift she had been given. I tried to remember what I had heard about her mother, her past, of fairies.

“Does it suit me?” she asked. “Do I look right?” Her voice was so soft it seemed like the rubbing of silk against the stone floor.

I forced myself to smile. “You look beautiful,” I said. “Like a princess. No one will be able to take their eyes off of you.”

Gently, I touched her shoulder and turned her to the glass. “Look,” I said.

I stared at her face as she watched herself. The shock in her eyes that turned to wonder. The happiness that seemed to bleed off her and color the room. I could feel it moving up over me and I winced, resisted the urge to slap it off.

This is what you are supposed to do, I told myself. This is who you are.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “I can’t believe it.” She turned her head back to me. “You have no idea how much I have dreamed about this.”

“Oh, I think I do,” I said, smiling, trying to keep my voice kindly but hearing that same sharp edge creep in. I glanced forward, into the glass, and caught my own face next to hers. My human face, with its hair like autumn, its green-grey eyes. The face he had seen. Oblivious, she leaned back against me, in a gesture of caring and thanks. I put my hand on her shoulder. Maternal. Soothing. I breathed her in, that same desire and longing, and when I closed my eyes, her thoughts became my thoughts. The feel of glass on marble as we walked up the silver stairs. Towards him. His arm circling around. She was so close to me, I thought. I could reach up and snap her neck.

I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror. This is who I am, I thought. And then: It should be me.

Hello!I am Laura E. Reagan and I write Romance novels. To date I have four published novels, 3 historical and 1 contemporary as well as one short contemporary story, both written under the pseudonym Jenna M. Fox. TAIL-TELL HEART Midnight Showcase 2007THE UNSUITABLE SUITOR Champagne Books 2007IF YOU ONLY DARE ArcheBooks 2006IF YOU ONLY KNEW ArcheBooks 2004 LOSE MY MIND Midnight Showcase

My website contains excerpts, reviews and purchasing information.Romance Run AmokThank you, Warren for letting me climb out from between the sheets...of paper.

I'm Christopher K. Burch, and at the moment I'm merely an aspiring novellist. I do have a couple of shorts out there, most notably in A Thousand Faces magazine. They do superhuman fiction, and publish quarterly. If you're into that field, I highly recommend submitting. The editor, Frank Byrns, is a stand up guy.

Meanwhile, I'm waist-deep in plotting out my first novel, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

I'm John. I (mostly) write thrillers and crime through Penguin in the UK, though the current one that's off with my agent is far more off-the-wall (so they tell me). The former are a four-book series - some better than others - starring an ex-FBI agent who has a succession of horrible things happen to him. The latter's a standalone set largely in an extra-jurisdictional housing project inspired in part by Kowloon's old Walled City. I've also done a couple of shorts for US anthologies.

A bit from (probably) the best of the books, where the main character, back in his Bureau days, has just joined the manhunt for a missing teenage girl and met the parents for the first time:

I decide to go with the truth. “We don’t know that, but there is a possibility, yes. Just as there’s a possibility that something totally different happened to Holly. It’s our job to find out for certain what happened and get her back for you if we can.”

Stop there, and pause as I catch sight of the framed family photos on the mantel at the far side of the room. Holly, smiling at me from behind the glass. Preserved, like a butterfly in a case. Next to the pictures are a couple of sporting trophies from some school tennis competition. A tiny model of a clarinet. Maybe she was learning to play the instrument. Fragments of a life preserved in miniature. Part of me wants to warn her parents, to soften the inevitable blow. To tell them that in child kidnap cases of stranger abduction for sexual purposes where the child is not released after the initial offence, ninety percent are dead within twenty-four to thirty-six hours of the abduction.

Mrs Tynon opens her mouth and says in a quiet, clear voice, eyes blank and hollow, “Did you find out for certain what happened to the other girls, Agent Rourke?”

That seventy-five percent are killed within the first three hours.

“Did you make the same promises to their parents? In all those weeks, do you even know where those children are?”

I've had a novel for about a year now. www.seanpatricklittle.comAll you need to know is there. Go to the purchase site to see a sample.

Two more coming at some point this year. Don't know when just yet. I'm in the middle of trying to move to a new city so it's throwing off everything.

My book was called "a cross between Paradise Lost and Dungeons & Dragons" by Kirkus...so, there you go. It's also drawn favorable comparisons to Neil Gaiman...which is good because I totally ripped off his idea of Death as a black-clad female...

The novels I've got coming up are the sequel to my first novel, a young adult superhero novel. These are the two I hope to kick out by the end of '08. I've also got a sci-fi novel that I plunk on occasionally, and a fantasy novel that I've plotted, but have only started writing.

My name is Michael Alan Nelson and before I started writing comics, I wrote a novel and serialized it online (even though I suppose that technically makes me a novelist, it was never formally published. So if that disqulifies me, please stop reading now).

The novel is called DINGO and it's free. You can read it here or download it for free in a number of different formats from Many Books here.

Somewhere in the desert, (it is whispered in red flowers that grow on the black-soiled banks of thick, dark-swollen rivers) there is a Tower which was once a Baobab tree, and in that tower there lived a little black prince-- or perhaps a princess, no one is quite sure-- who was born a vulture and was not very happy. In some versions of the story, it is not a human child at all, but a little doll of a baby, made by a mad toymaker who had some of the Pygmalion in him manifest in his insanity. What is Frankenstein but Pygmalion a little unbalanced, after all?

Felice the Writer wrote a horror story about it, for all that she knew what it was really about. In her story, some Taxidermist-man lost his wife giving birth to a still-born child, whom he snuck away from the hospital in a jar of formaldehyde and attar of roses. He went into his laboratory filled with stuffed animals: springing cats and cougars, bears with glass eyes and beloved pets and hunted prey of eccentrically morbid rich people; deer, horses, foxes, hawks, eagles, rabbits, (not Those kind of Rabbits) and the like.

He knew his doll-baby wasn't really dead, not in the way that they all mean. He could hear the little spirit-child hovering about his head, whispering and whimpering about the life it might have known, only there was this block that prevented it from entering the body to which it was supposed to belong. An invisible wall, which is really what you want if you are trying to confine the invisible, the ephemeral. He could hear it weeping, wanting to come to him and love its daddy. He could hear the beating of its wings, brushing against his face.

So he took the child into his studio and he got to work. He made it an angel baby, he called upon the spirit of things which feed on dead flesh and he married them to his little doll: that is, he took the wings from a baby vulture and sewed them onto the child's back, plastered feathers on to make it dream of flight. He prayed and sweated and loved, carefully preserving the creature he had almost created with the help of a woman who was dead, and whose reflection he could see in the tiny, blue-black glass eyes beneath little lids, held open with toothpicks. Once he had done that he found among his bits and pieces of trade-materials: a little glass eye, black as the ace of spades, black as the night in Assyria when there is no moon: a black glass eye that had no mate. He sewed this into the baby's forehead, making a little lid of skin, perfectly from the model of the baby's perfect little eyes, and complete with tiny black lashes. A third eye, to see through space and time. So that the baby could be half in this world, half in the next: with its mother and with its father both, the one dead and the other living.

And the baby cried, through its mouth and its cold nose, smelling of embalming fluid, and it began to grow. No breath did it take and perhaps it had no heart, but the thing grew: a Pinocchio golem of flesh and blood, a necromantic tribute to the miracle of creation. He did that, the mad taxidermist, who wanted more than anything in his heart to be a father. He listened to the black dog that curled up at his fireside, stuffed and dead with the glittering black eyes and the black top hat, dusty with age on his head. The piece was the thing that had got him into taxidermy in the first place: such an old, antique thing, its glittering glass eyes the very reality of life.

"Write on the back of the third eye with an etching tool the Hebrew word: Emeth, which is Truth, and you will see for yourself."

So there it was, this squalling black Pinocchio, this nightmare Galatea: the father's Heart's Desire, his pride and joy.

He loved it so, he kissed it and called it his own. He loved it in the way that one loves collections, built things, the work of one's own hands. How one loves children, I suppose.

Tristan Henry-Wilson here. i'm in the process of illustrating a collection with a publishing date to be determined. the guy didn't want to post here though.

They'll know when the collection comes out. Besides, I haven't gotten the rubberstamp from the CBLDF saying I can give my percentage to them. The thread says novelist, doesn't it? I don't know them any better than you do, not really. If I were you I'd just post whatever snippet you like best and go with that.

And you already had a nickname, I told her. It didn't seem to matter at the time, she told me. I wanted her to elaborate on which part didn't matter- the fact that her old friends had given her a nickname, or that they were her friends at all.